AS THE WORLD TURNS: Masculinity under attack / Denying global warming deemed a crime against humanity / Ireland defies European Union

News Weekly, July 5, 2008

AS THE WORLD TURNS:

Masculinity under attack

Today, more often than not, television portrays husbands as bumbling losers or contemptible, self-absorbed egomaniacs.

Whether in dramas, comedies or commercials, the patriarchy is dead, at least on TV where men are fools — unless of course they're gay.

On Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, the "fab five" are supremely knowledgeable on all things hip, their life's highest purpose being to help those less fortunate than themselves — that is, straight men — to become cool.

However, it's not only in Hollywood, but on Main Street, that masculinity has become uncool and even despised. The evidence is everywhere:

In public school classrooms across America, in every category and every demographic group, boys are falling behind.

Young boys — who don't naturally thrive when forced to sit still at a desk listening to a teacher lecture for six hours a day — are diagnosed by the millions with new diseases that didn't exist a generation ago.

To "treat" them and make their behaviour more acceptable, we force them to take dangerous psycho-stimulant drugs....

Thus, rather than focusing on understanding boys' actual make-up and crafting an educational experience to fit their genuine needs, "pediatricians and child psychiatrists are increasingly turning to pharmacology as the treatment of choice for depression, attention disorder, severe anxiety, obsessive disorder, manic depression and other conditions," reports the New York Times.

And twice as many boys as girls are being given these psychiatric drugs....

Oh yes, the suicide rate among teen boys is far higher than that of girls.

— from David Kupelian, "The war on fathers", WorldNetDaily.com, October 9, 2006.

James Hansen, one of the world's leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.

Hansen will use the symbolically charged 20th anniversary of his groundbreaking speech to the US Congress — in which he was among the first to sound the alarm over the reality of global warming — to argue that radical steps need to be taken immediately if the "perfect storm" of irreversible climate change is not to become inevitable.

Speaking before Congress again, he will accuse the chief executive officers of companies such as ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy of being fully aware of the disinformation about climate change they are spreading.

In an interview with the Guardian he said: "When you are in that kind of position, as the CEO of one the primary players who have been putting out misinformation even via organisations that affect what gets into school textbooks, then I think that's a crime."

His sharpest words are reserved for the special interests he blames for public confusion about the nature of the global warming threat. "The problem is not political will, it's the alligator shoes — the lobbyists. It's the fact that money talks in Washington, and that democracy is not working the way it's intended to work."

The Irish have convincingly voted NO to the Lisbon Treaty. Outside Dublin Castle a vast crowd is cheering. White-faced Eurocrats cannot believe what they are hearing and seeing.

The Lisbon Treaty was supposed to mark the moment when the United States of Europe irrevocably became a political and juridical entity, with the character of an empire.

In earlier stages of the empire-building process, the French and the Dutch voted NO in referendums, but the European Union and national governments chose to ignore those votes, pressing ahead as though public opinion did not exist.

The 27 heads of states in Europe all signed up to the treaty in draft, and all are in the process of ratifying it, simply bulldozing it through by means of presidential decree or parliamentary measures without consulting their populations. The absence of democratic consent would have been delightfully familiar to Stalin.

All except the Irish, that is. Their constitution alone specified a referendum. As usual, the elite, big business, the media, favoured a YES vote, and took it for granted. But the Irish people did not want to lose their constitution or their sovereignty.

If other countries in the EU were allowed a similar vote, they too would reject the Lisbon Treaty. In a very real sense, the Irish have spoken for the majority of Europeans.

— from David Pryce-Jones, "Stop press — news flash!", David Calling: The David Pryce-Jones Blog, June 13, 2008.